Dog handler pleads guilty to federal charge
KANSAS CITY, KAN. – A dog trainer who helped a prisoner escape the Lansing Correctional Facility last year pleaded guilty to a federal charge of knowingly giving a firearm to a felon and fugitive.Toby Young, a 49-year-old Kansas City, Kan., woman, faces up to 10 years in federal prison, up to three years of supervision following her release and as many as $250,000 in fines when she’s sentenced on June 18.She entered the guilty plea on Wednesday afternoon a the United States Federal Court in Kansas City, Kan., before Chief Judge John W. Lungstrum.Young was the president of the Safe Harbor Prison Dogs program, which allowed her to become a regular visitor to inmates and a familiar sight among guards at the Lansing Correctional Facility. On Feb. 12, 2006, she used a dog crate and a van to help John Manard, 28, escape from incarceration.Manard was serving a life sentence at the facility for the first-degree murder of a man in Overland Park in 1996.Young and Manard went to Tennessee following the escape where they stayed in a cabin before they were apprehended on Feb. 24, 2006 following a brief car chase from authorities on an interstate between Chattanooga and Knoxville. Young was charged in federal court for providing Manard, a convicted felon and fugitive at the time, with access to two handguns.At the hearing Wednesday, Young said she hated guns. She also said she never furnished Manard with the guns, which belonged to Young’s husband.”I never told anyone I gave him the guns,” she told the court. Young said guns existed in her Kansas City, Kan., home because other members of her family were hunters and that she couldn’t get rid of the guns because she was never alone in the house.Nevertheless, her attorney, Mike Harris, said the fact that Manard had the guns and Young and did nothing about it still put her in violation of the law.”She knew Manard had her guns and she allowed that to go on,” Harris, a federal public defender, told the court.Supporters for Young appeared in the courtroom, but declined to comment afterwards.Young already pleaded guilty in Leavenworth County District Court to aiding and abetting aggravated prison escape and introducing contraband to a prison, for which she was sentenced for 21 months in prison on July 12, 2006.Manard entered a guilty plea to felony escape and was sentenced in February to 130 months in prison.